The word Hypertext refers to non-sequential writing in which portions of a document are linked through hyper-links allowing a reader to access the text in the sequence of his or her own choosing.

Hypertext Systems are implementations of Hypertext on computer systems. Hypermedia is a non-sequential document containing not only text but elements such as audio, video, drawings and photographs, along with the computer systems on which the audio-visual components are stored and displayed.

A World Wide Web HTML document, the audio-visual components, a browser, the computers that the document are stored and displayed on make up a Hypermedia system. You probably already knew that.

What lots of people do not know is that the idea of Hypertext was first dreamed up in the 1940s by Dr. Vannevar Bush from MIT. Without using the word hypertext, he wrote about hypertext as a new way of communicating research results.

The word Hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson in his 1965 book "Dream Machines". The article Bush wrote was titled "As We May Think" and was published in the Atlantic Monthly.

In 1945, Doug Englebart was in the Phillipines, waiting to come home after the war, and chanced upon Bush's article in the Red Cross library. It changed his life. He ended up at Stanford Research Institute and invented the computer mouse which he demonstrated at a San Francisco engineering conference in 1968.

The purpose behind this section is to provide a few more details about the history of the development of Hypertext, Hypertext Systems, and Hypermedia.

I hope you find it interesting and informative.